How To Reduce Time Wastage Inside Facebook

Facebook can be a friend and a foe. It’s up to you to determine how you are going to use it, whether making it a friend to share your most important things in life with friends in real world, or staring in awe at a boring window scrolling the page up and down, murmuring “I hate you, I hate you for what you’ve done to my life” is up to you.

You don’t realize how facebook consumes your time, up until you see you’ve missed several important hours you had planned for your studies, or some task like that. That is the nature of the facebook. It does not activate an alarm clock when you log in, and frequently keep telling you that you now have spent this much here, now it’s better if you go. The more time you spent inside facebook, the more they like it, because it’s their business. So it’s up to you to be smart and manipulate your time to take what’s best from facebook and dispose what is potentially bad. The best way to save your time is understanding how you are wasting it inside this site. Here is the list of precautions I could think of. Of course there would be more and more, that you could add to this list.

1. Know the exact purpose of logging on at a particular time.

It is very essential to understand why exactly you are thinking to log on to your facebook account at the moment. Is it to relax a while, for a study break? or to share your photos at recent hiking trip with your closest friends? Or to check your inbox and reply to messages your friends are waiting for a reply? or to chat with your best friend? Know why exactly you are logging on, Calculate how much time you will need for the task, think about other tasks in your daily schedule you are required to do after this break, and plan how much time you are going to spend there. Take your watch with you. And then on your mark, set, Log on!

(If you don’t know why you are logging on, better don’t, you will ruin hours!)

Complete the task you needed to do, keep track of time, with your watch. Do not do anything apart from your primary target. You can comment on that post sometime later, this is not the time, you jut came to post your own photo, not to comment on others’, so do it, and sign out! Sounds ridiculous? Never mind, you saved hours for your next real task of the day, may be it’s another physics paper, or may be even cooking, anything. You are not in a race with the time; you have plenty, so no stress at all!

What’s more important, killing hours inside facebook scrolling page up and down with out knowing what you should do, and later rat-racing for your daily tasks, Or investing the time you wasted for nothing for daily tasks and completing them effortlessly? I think you know the answer.

Let’s move on to our list. In fact almost everything that follows comes under the first topic, but for better representation I will write them down.

2. Unfollow posts in which you are tagged in, if you are not interested in them

Even your closest friends have ideas you don’t particularly like. May be it’s a photo posted by one of your friends, and you are tagged in .Now facebook identifies this as your photo, and when any one comments, or says they like it, you are notified each time. Even when you are offline your email inbox gets crowded with various comments, if you haven’t disabled it from receiving messages from facebook. Even if you have, your facebook interface will be a mess with loads of notifications, and you would easily be distracted, reading every notification to find if there are useful ones. The ultimate result is nothing but wastage of time, so better unfollow the posts early, if you don’t want to hear from them again!

3. Do not over use (in fact don’t use) 3rd party applications and games inside facebook

What do you think some flash games doing inside a site they market for sharing our things with closest ones? All the time you are not going to play with your best friend, most of the time you will play with strangers, or alone in some games. So it won’t be like some get together at all .Is it the reason you came to facebook? To play some very basic games? If you did either you don’t have any specific task at all in your day,( to cook, to learn, to read, to play, to listen to music, well, nothing at all, you just came to check in whether the games could keep you busy), Or you re ADDICTED.

Yes that’s the word. You are addicted. It’s something like a trap, to steal few more hours of your day, set jointly by the facebook and the game company. If you get trapped, for sure you will ruin your day.

I personally think whatever you need to do within your day is much more important than playing few flash games inside facebook.

Same goes with the 3rd party apps. It is wise to avoid using them because allowing them to access your profile also puts your identity in danger.

3. Avoid posting useless status updates.

If you have no idea at all about what you are going to post, then don’t. It is easy, and wise. If you post something very silly, without a doubt the comments from your friends would be even more silly and ridiculous. Perhaps you will laugh for few second with them, but you should realize you just wasted time for a very unimportant thing, and it was all your own fault. Any useless status carries an embedded message “Hey, I need to waste my time, come and help me”.

4. Leave groups you are not interested in following

Sometimes without your approval, your friends add you into groups inside facebook. Sometimes you never even care what that particular group is about, and you have no interest at all to be in that group, but you just don’t care. That’s another mistake. Within a very short time your wall will be filled, and your notification bar will glow constantly, with the posts in that particular group. You have to use either hide all posts option, for that particular group, or you have to pretend you don’t see. But the best thing is leaving the group, if you are not interested in it.

Same goes with group chatting. If there are many members inside a particular group, group chatting would become something really confusing. No one knows who they are talking to. The ultimate result is that you loose your time for something not worthy. (If the group is very small, this won’t be much of a problem). So before you jump into a group chat, understand the situation there, and if it’s nothing but wastage of time and effort, then don’t start typing hi!

5. If you think your time is something valuable then do not go through ‘people you may know’, or ‘suggested subscriptions’ etc.

Your that friend is friends with that particular one, and this one with that person.. Ough I don’t want to know with whom other people are being friends. And same goes with subscriptions. I do not want any one to prompt me to become friends with some one else, for no reason other than we are having few mutual friends. Never go through lists they display for you, it’s a sheer waste of your time, and a threat to your privacy. If you don’t want strangers inside your account, say no to those suggestions.

Similarly do not keep posting requests to people in the whole world to become friends with you. You are just wasting your time. What is the use of having so many strangers as ‘friends’? Are they friends really? I think you know the answer.

6. Do not let facebook be the decision maker. You decide what you should do.

Now we are coming to the end. You said 'see you' to your best friend and clicked log out. Gosh it’s over at last. You sigh while you are logging off.

When exactly it decided to give us instructions on what we should do next? We do not know but it is better to keep our head straight. It’s up to you to decide whether you have completed the task you needed to, inside Facebook, or you still want some more. (More is obviously very bad for you!). Confusing your much more important tasks along with facebook mobile is not a wise task at all.

So here we go. Facebook is not an evil, nor a very good friend. Use it with care, do not confuse it with your life.

Comments 7 comments

Very good idea for a Hub and very nicely written. Good luck on HubPages!

letterme 5 years ago Author

Thank you for the nice words rebeccamealey. They encourage me a lot :)

robyna 5 years ago from Michigan, USA

I had to laugh at your first paragraph because I could relate to it more than I cared to admit! :D I've done several of the things you suggested but you've given me even more tips to get control of FB time. My family thanks you! LOL!

letterme 5 years ago Author

Thank you for your kind words robyna. :)

thougtforce 5 years ago from Sweden

I found that it is easy to be addicted to many things concerning Internet and computers! There is always something new to read, do or see. Right now, I am totally absorbed by photos, pictures, blogs, Hubpages and also FaceBook pages. I am only in the beginning of using FaceBook but I can see that it clicks all the buttons for us humans: we can socialize with others without going anywhere, we get constant encouraging from our friends and it is so easy! Thanks for all the great tips and a well done hub!

Tina

letterme 5 years ago Author

Tina, Thank you very much for all these wonderful words.

Sunshine625 5 years ago from Orlando, FL

Excellent tips regarding Facebook! I find Facebook very useful not only for staying in touch with my family and friends but also for the abundance of knowledge that's offered via the FB groups and media connections. I'm not a fan of the drama that some people share but with the new format that annoyance is easy to hide or remove. Thanks for the tips!